In response to AJC columnist and blogger, Jay Bookman’s words today, I have written the following:

Words are empty vehicles without consciousness behind them. King’s consciousness, derived from the teachings of Jesus and Gandhi, will live in his story and in his sacrificial life because that consciousness, as with that of Jesus, will continue to change the course of history.

A few days ago, another poster expressed embittered words at President Obama’s loss and Donald Trump’s rise. He went on to state that anyone who thought like King, or Jesus, were losers, by the ways of the world, and that we should aspire to be winners, at any cost to our values, or become losers, ourselves. That is the legacy that Donald Trump will leave in the consciousness of humankind.

It is up to us, the living, to model what course this nation and world should become not through inane consciousness of “winners” and “losers” but through the reverence that all humanity, and all life, itself, is sacred. We cannot violate that sacredness without destroying ourselves individually and as a world community. King’s words will forever stand as testimony to his higher consciousness and those words can be found, forever, engraved in stone by the monument of his image on the Washington D.C. grounds overlooking the monuments of Lincoln, Jefferson, and Washington and with equal status of those other great men of America’s history and aspirations.